Before Curiosity Landed, Gale Crater Was Cut Into Rectangles With Earthly Names

Long before the rover arrived, the area of Gale crater that Curiosity would explore was divided into rectangular parcels, each with a designated name. Those names were drawn from small towns associated with significant geological features, so a patch of Mars carries the label of a place on Earth that earned its fame from rock. Inside each rectangle, targets picked out by the mission — mesas, bedrock, soil, boulders — were then given unofficial names based on the theme of that parcel. That is how a foreign landscape becomes workable. A team spending months inside one quad needs to be able to say “drill there” and have everyone picture the same object, and a shared theme makes the vocabulary stick. The naming is administrative and unromantic, and it may be the reason the science can be argued about at all: you cannot debate a contact between rock layers that nobody can name.